Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [333]
7.2 The Heidelberg Jaw
In addition to dubois’s Java man discoveries, further evidence relating to human evolution turned up in the form of the Heidelberg jaw. On October 21,
1907, daniel Hartmann, a workman at a sand pit at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany, discovered a large jawbone at the bottom of the excavation, at a depth of 82 feet. the workmen were on the lookout for bones, and many other nonhuman fossils had already been found there and turned over to the geology department at the nearby University of Heidelberg. the workman then brought the jaw (Figure 7.3) over to J. Rösch, the owner of the pit, who sent a message to dr. Otto Schoetensack: “For twenty long years you have sought some trace of early man in my pit . . . yesterday we found it. A lower jaw belonging to early man has been found on the floor of the pit, in a very good state of preservation” (Wendt 1972, p. 161).
Figure 7.3. The Heidelberg mandible, discovered in 1907 at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany (Osborn 1916, p. 98).
Professor Schoetensack designated the creature Homo heidelbergensis, dating it using the accompanying fossils to the Günz-Mindel interglacial period. david pilbeam (1972, p. 169) said: “it appears to date from the Mindel glaciation, and its age is somewhere between 250,000 and 450,000 years.”
The German anthropologist Johannes Ranke, an opponent of evolution, wrote in the 1920s that the Heidelberg jaw belonged to a representative of Homo sapiens rather than an apelike predecessor ( Wendt 1972, p. 162).
Even today, the Heidelberg jaw remains somewhat of a morphological mystery. the thickness of the mandible and the apparent lack of a chin are features common in Homo erectus. But mandibles of some modern Australian aboriginals are also massive compared to jaws of modern europeans and have chins that are less well developed (Le Gros clark and campbell 1978, p. 96, figure 11).
According to Frank e. poirier (1977, p. 213), the teeth in the Heidelberg jaw are closer in size to those of modern Homo sapiens than those of Asian Homo erectus (Java man and peking man). t. W. phenice of Michigan State University wrote (1972, p. 64): “the teeth are remarkably like those of modern man in almost every respect, including size and cusp patterns.”
Modern opinion thus confirms Ranke, who wrote in 1922: “The teeth are typically human; the canines do not project above the level of the other teeth, and the third molar, which in primitive races of men—for instance often in the aboriginal Australians—is similar in size to or even larger than the second, is smaller in the Heidelberg jaw, just as in our more advanced races today” ( Wendt 1972, p. 162).
Many Homo erectus jaws are characterized by projecting canines and a diastema, a gap in the teeth that accommodates the tip of a projecting canine. the fact that these features were absent in the Heidelberg jaw, and other considerations, led poirier (1977, p. 213) to question: “is Heidelberg a representative of Homo erectus or a primitive member of the species H. sapiens?”
The Heidelberg jaw is one of the few european fossils generally attributed to Homo erectus. Another is the Vértesszöllös occipital fragment, from a Middle pleistocene site in Hungary.
The morphology of the Vértesszöllös occipital is even more puzzling than that of the Heidelberg jaw. david pilbeam (1972, p. 169) wrote: “the occipital bone does not resemble that of H. erectus, or even archaic man, but instead that of earliest modern man. Such forms are dated elsewhere as no older than 100,000 years.” Pilbeam believed